Unscripted: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship pdfdrive com

~ Bernard Baruch, Businessman
THE DICHOTOMY: WEALTH (99%) VS. INCOME (1%)
N
obody gambles in Las Vegas expecting to lose. Nope, you arrive at this opulent
casino shimmering in imported crystal chandeliers and marble thinking you’ll be
the next big winner. You roll dice, hit some blackjacks, and plunk a few coins in
the quarter slots. Your goal? To win the wealth that surrounds you. And yet, like
the millions who gambled before you, it never clicks that 
such grand palaces
aren’t built on winners, but on losers
. Sadly and unbeknown to the 
SCRIPTED
,
such duplicity also exists in the financial markets.
Thanks to the consensus myth perpetuated by a complicit government, an
abetting media, and a cartel of financial conglomerates, the world’s
megacorporations forever enjoy a steady spigot of “wishful-money” much like
the Vegas casino. In turn, the smart money, the few who own the casinos, then
“slow cook” and manage the money, becoming fabulously wealthy in the process.
While wishful-money victims take the gambled wait for the deferred promise of
wealth, the 
SCRIPTED
straitjacket cinches tighter. Meanwhile, bankers make
bank.
Take for instance this story about Billy Banker and Iggy Investor.

---

Iggy, the consummate 
SCRIPTED
Slowlaner, has fallen for temporal
prostitution’s BFF: 
compound interest
. Iggy believes regular retail investments in
stocks, mutual funds, and 401(k)s produce future wealth, provided Iggy patiently
waits a few decades.
Fascinated by the market’s wealth-curative powers, Iggy wins a tour of New
York’s financial district. Excited to witness how his money is managed, he meets
his tour guide, Billy Banker, a successful hedge-fund manager.
The tour begins on the exchange floor with the opening bell and proceeds
skyward to the penthouse offices. The elevator slides open, where Iggy enters a
large atrium, overpowered by brash ivory and money-green marble floors. Atop
a centerpiece, a lush floral arrangement of roses, orchids, and gladiolus scents the
room—the last time Iggy saw so many flowers was at a funeral. Ahead, a large
reception desk fashioned in similar-colored marble embosses the fund’s official
corporate insignia, a platinum sculpture probably sculpted by Picasso himself.
Indeed, the ninety-eighth floor is presided over by the financial empire known as
Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe.
The penthouse offices, each backlit by the imposing Manhattan skyline,
home a variety of astutely manicured men, cuffed in tailored suits and diamond
watches. Gregarious red-pinned leather chairs station large mahogany desks,
exuding the type of power reserved for an emperor’s throne room.
As the tour continues, Iggy peeks at the employee parking garage. It rivals an
exotic car dealership featuring Mercedes, Maybachs, and McLarens. Others
reveal that such trivialities are not needed and transact in caviar-stocked
limousines and yachts docked at the marina.
By lunchtime, Iggy is amazed by the surrounding magnificence. He’s
enraptured that these bankers, stockbrokers, and hedge-fund managers are
wildly successful managing money—his money. Billy Banker catches Iggy’s
enchantment and winks, “C’mon, we’re not done yet.”
After a short drive to Greenwich, Connecticut, Iggy is escorted into a guard-
gated community featuring majestic brick estates with turreted architecture,
grand porticoes, and brick-lined driveways winding through the pristine acreage.
“Here,” Billy Banker explains, motioning to the stately mansions, “is where
we live.”
Iggy affirms, “Wow, finance is a great business to be in!” Billy Banker nods
his head and corks a mercurial smile. Impressed his money appears in good
hands, Iggy asks, “So Billy, if this is where you live, where do your customers
live?”

---

Billy Banker signals his hand toward his BMW 7 Series and says, “Let me
show you.”
A short drive later, they are in Bridgeport, where Billy parks his Beemer on a
street lined with narrow two-and three-story row houses. Iggy steps outside the
car and absorbs the neighborhood.
The stench of diesel fuel steams the summer air. The potholed street is lined
with broken cement sidewalks that have lost their battle with the years. Hugging
the curb, a tireless Civic sits stilted on cinder blocks, its back window shattered in
half, beaming like a perilous guillotine ready to behead an unsupervised child.
Unlike the community they just visited where the skies were painted green with
the flowering treetops from mature oaks, the sky here is littered with an
entangled mass of electrical cables and telephone wires, feeding each house like
breathing tubes to a comatose patient.
Iggy courts a momentary thought of Oz and Kansas.
Unlike the distinguished residences he just saw, the homes here are panicked
in unique distress. Some have white picket fences, which are no longer white and
no longer picketed. Other homeowners have outlined their properties with
chain-link fences, which mostly lie nonfunctional and slumped over in disrepair.
Box fans smother open windows; their curtain comrades dance
unceremoniously, a coerced acknowledgment to the artificially induced breeze.
The houses themselves stand incongruently organized, gangly and marred by
rotting wood and flecking paint, each standing curbside like a chorus line of
aging centurions proud to have withstood the turbulent decades.
Billy Banker pans his Rolex-wrapped hand outward and showcases the
distressed avenue like a grand prize on 
The Price is Right
.
“This, my friend, is where our customers live.”
WALL STREET WON’T MAKE YOU RICH
News flash! Compound interest is a scam. The stock market isn’t going to
make you rich. And neither will that ETF, that mutual fund, or that 401(k). That
is, unless you plan on managing that ETF, that mutual fund, or that 401(k).
The truth is, the good folks on Wall Street aren’t in the business of making
you rich; they’re in the business of making themselves rich. And now that the
government has backstopped their failures (but not yours), be assured, the
compound-interest scam will remain one of most whitewashed belief scams in
existence.

---

The compound-interest scam is this serendipitous orthodoxy that the stock
market will someday make you, the common man, uncommonly rich.
Shoveled
down your throat in gag-worthy quantities and upheld by the frugality scam, this
financial ideology cries for regimented saving, investing, and of course, patience,
hopefully followed by a long life expectancy.
Again, peek inside any personal finance book. Within minutes, I guarantee
you’ll read the same old tired dance, a preachy sermon which sounds like this:
Invest X dollars into the stock market every month for X decades, and
abracadabra, just like magic, you’ll have X millions by your sixty-fifth birthday!
Such magical outcomes are then backed by magical charts, which undoubtedly
show your financial empire magically ascending into the stratosphere. Such
utopian claims are then paired with what I call the 
Utopian Graph
—a financial
chart illustrating how much money compounds after fifty years if you just stop
drinking coffee and, instead, religiously invest those savings with Billy Banker.
“Start investing early and often,” the articles say. “Compound interest is the
most powerful force in the universe,” echo the financial acolytes. #SlowClap.
#RollEyes.
Anytime the Utopian Graph rears its face—be warned—you’re about to be
laundered in the compound-interest scam.
The same narrative powering Las Vegas powers the compound-interest scam:
a survivor bias
. When someone wins, you’ll hear about it. Big winners grab
headlines. When a coworker wins in Vegas, you’ll hear about it in a Facebook
status. And while he won $263, thousands of others lost hundreds, thousands,
and yes, even millions.
Those losers? They say nothing. Crickets. They don’t appear in headlines,
and they don’t make the statistics. But these statistics do peek insight into the
survivor bias’s size and who goes home a quiet loser: The Wynn Casino cost $2.7
billion to build. Bellagio: $1.6 billion. Singapore’s Sentosa: just under $5 billion.
Similarly, when Iggy Investor wins at Wall Street, we’re guaranteed to hear
about it—on Yahoo’s front page, in best-selling “Millionaire” books, or in some
financial magazine whose ad revenues are funded by the money megafirms.
Every day someone, somewhere, trumpets these frugalicious stories. The
subversion method, always the same: plaster the photo of a young couple and
their kids standing in front of a cute house, arms crossed, ceremoniously smiling
with a shit-eating grin, and then tag with click-bait…